On the Banks of the River of Heaven

by Richard Parks

  “Do you? That’s not quite the same thing as seeking Death.”

  Julan thought about it. “Well . . . it’s rather unusual that a man’s Death should go missing. I’ll admit to a certain curiosity.”

  “Why should the dead be curious? You seem to think you are, for all practical purposes, dead. Life is about curiosity; I don’t fancy the dead are curious about very much at all.”

  “Whatever the reason, I’m not dead yet.”

  “So you think you should be dead, but you don’t actually prefer it? Or welcome it?”

  Julan was a little irritated. “I can’t change the order of the world! It doesn’t matter what I want.”

  “When did a hero speak so? Are you so sure what is and is not the order of the world?”

  Julan had no answer to that, so he kept silent. The spider finished spinning her ball of silk and attached it to the top of the pillar like an offering. Which, Julan thought, it probably was.

  “What was she like?” the spider asked after a bit.

  “She who? You mean the Guardian? Or Kalissa?”

  The spider laughed. It sounded like a rain of pebbles down a hillside. “I know what the Guardian was like. Everyone knows what Kalissa was like. Fair as summer, bright as the sun. It’s in all the songs. I want to know about Widow; her evil and foul nature is often described, but never the lady herself.”

  Julan remembered Widow well enough, from memory and dream alike. He remembered her pale skin, her dark eyes, her long white hair, shining and soft as spider’s silk.

  “She was very beautiful,” Julan said because it was, he realized, no less than truth.

  “Was she? You’d think at least one of the songs would have mentioned that.”

  “I’m not responsible for those infernal songs!”

  The spider laughed again. “Well, not directly, I’ll grant you. No matter, I’ve enjoyed your company; it’s not often I get to speak to a human these days. In way of recompense, I’ll tell you something you don’t know: the Enchantress Widow captured your Death all those years ago and sealed it away somewhere in her fortress. She is the cause of your suffering . . . if such it is.”

  Julan frowned. “How do you know this?”

  The spider shrugged by raising itself slightly on its eight black legs. “Common knowledge among spider-folk. Some of us are just about everywhere hereabouts, and have been since my ancestor’s time. My kin saw what happened and passed the story along. If you really want to die, find your Death and set it free.”

  “I stood before the Enchantress Widow and, for almost too long, did nothing but gaze at her beauty.”

  —From the so-called “Memoirs of Julan the Lucky.”

  Not considered authentic, or even very interesting.

  Julan considered what the spider had told him as he carefully picked his way through the rubble partially blocking the entrance to the fortress. It occurred to him that the spider had no real reason to lie to him. Or to tell him the truth, for that matter. Still, he had come to the Abandoned Lands because it was the only place he knew to go, and the part about Widow stealing his Death made sense of a sort, if anything did. That left a great many unanswered questions, including just how far he could trust what he had been told.

  “There’s only one way to find out. And it’s not as if I would be doing something different if the spider had not come along.”

  All true enough. The fortress, he realized finally, had been his goal all along. He wanted to see it. He did not know why; that was another question needing an answer. Julan cleared the last pile of debris and came to the bridge.

  The bridge, a stone arch reaching over the ring pit surrounding the fortress proper, was still standing, but the gates to the fortress itself, which Julan remembered being of ebony and rather magnificent, were broken and rotten. The timbers, massive as they had been, had all given way to either the weight of forty years or the loss of the Enchantress’ magic. Either way they had fallen, and once past the bridge Julan’s way into the fortress was clear. This, too, was much different than the last time. There were guards here too, as he recalled. Human guards, or something rather like a human. Their armor covered them almost entirely; Julan hadn’t stopped to look at their faces once he’d killed them.

  He stopped this time, at the rusty remnants where he recalled one of the guards had fallen. He lifted the visor, still in place all this time, and looked within. Nothing but spider’s webs.

  “Perhaps there was never anything there at all.”

  Or perhaps someone had come and taken the bodies away, leaving the armor. Julan didn’t think so. The Abandoned Lands had remained the Abandoned Lands, even long after the mistress of this fortress had been destroyed. No one had been here in all this time. No one else would come after him. All the deeds were done—save one—and there was nothing here to call anyone as he had been called, for love and glory, so long ago.

  And it had been long ago. Very long. Julan wasn’t sure how much he could trust his memory, except where it showed him what he expected to find. That worried him, just a little. How would he know true memory from false? Did it matter now, after all these years? Julan wasn’t sure.

  “I think I killed her in the throne room,” Julan said, and he went the way he remembered to go, through the ruined doorway and into the great echoing hall beyond.

  Her servants scattered . . .

  He remembered the screaming, the confusion. He wasn’t supposed to reach them. Their mistress’ power had failed, and they were afraid.

  One opposed me here.

  Julan looked down. He saw nothing but a rusting, broken sword, but it was enough. The servant had fled. They had all fled. He remembered no faces. It was all a blur. They didn’t matter. The one who sat on the throne mattered.

  She summoned her spiders against me.

  They flew at him, conjured from Widow’s outstretched fingers, trailing silken threads. They were not to small, not to large. His blade was a shining blue, there in that dim place. The threads parted, the spiders lay broken and dying. He looked down, saw nothing. Which was no more or less than what he did expect; there would be nothing left of them by now.

  “So it begins,” said the Enchantress Widow.

  Julan had forgotten that detail; probably because it made no sense at the time or after. Nothing was beginning, save Julan’s new life with Kalissa. He hadn’t actually met Kalissa yet, but he knew where to find her, once the last obstacle was overcome. Widow was the last obstacle, and he did overcome her. He pinned her to the ebony throne with the point of his sword. He did hesitate before he killed Widow, and for almost too long; he remembered that bit. She was so beautiful.

  She smiled at him. Why had she smiled at him? To make him forget why he had come? Well, it didn’t work. At least, not for long.

  Julan stood before the empty throne. No, not quite empty. A few bones lay on the rotting wood, a few more were scattered on the dusty stone floor. The skull had rolled some distance away but it regarded him now, with empty eyes, a few feet away beneath a rotting tapestry. Not so much left of her beauty now. No more than Julan would expect.

  Except that it was all wrong.

  “There was no body,” Julan said aloud. “When I slew the Enchantress Widow her form, her flesh, all turned into spiders.”

  A man doesn’t forget a detail like that, even after fifty years. Julan was sure of it: when the sword pierced her, her rippled and came apart into thousands of scurrying black spiders. He’d stomped a few of them and the rest scattered into the stonework. He’d ignored them after that, going down into the dungeons to free Kalissa. He’d even forgotten the Enchantress Widow’s beauty as he turned his attention to his memory of Kalissa’s fair face and form, as his dreams and visions that led him to that desolate place had revealed to him. Kalissa was the goal, always had been . . .

  The bones were gone.

  First they were there, then they were not. Julan almost drew his sword then and there. He looked around, but nothing els
e had changed.

  “There’s more afoot here than I realized.”

  “You do have a way of stating the obvious.”

  It was the spider. She perched in the frame of a broken window. Being a spider, her face was pretty much unreadable, but Julan had the distinct impression that she would smile, if poison fangs and crushing mandibles were made for such.

  “So. I wondered if your curiosity of me was satisfied yet. I also have the feeling you know more of this matter than you have revealed.”

  “I knew about your captive Death. Why should I not know other things as well? Yet did you ask? You did not. Action without sufficient consideration. Understandable in a child of twenty and five. Less so now. You still have a reckless streak in you.”

  “Still? You speak again as if you know me, and not just ‘of’ me as you said before. Where you here, then? When it all happened?”

  “Perhaps I was. Perhaps I was a part of Enchantress Widow. Perhaps a humble spinner in some crevice with a good view. Will I tell you? No. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, then. Will you tell me where my Death can be found?”

  The spider made a sound distinctly like a sigh. “In the dungeons somewhere. That’s where she usually stored things not requiring a lot of thought. Didn’t you assume as much yourself?”

  Julan had, in fact, assumed exactly that. He wasn’t sure why he’d asked the spider, except perhaps to verify what he already believed likely. He remembered the way. Julan paused a little while to light a torch with flint and steel from his pack, then pushed the rotting tapestry aside and went through the small door hidden there.

  “What will you do with your Death when you find it?”

  “I will set it free.”

  “If you do that, you will die. Yet you didn’t say you wanted to die. In fact, I had the definite impression that you did not.”

  “It’s right that I die. I can’t go on like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I already told you. It’s not right! When I think of what this has put my family through . . . ”

  “Unfortunate, but no longer a consideration. You left your home, and you did not plan to return. Your family will go on with your memory. Dying or not dying doesn’t change that.”

  Julan stopped. “How do you know about that?!”

  “No mystery. You said you came to find Death. Therefore it stands to reason you did not plan to return. Therefore any family remaining to you are grieving already. Think, Julan; you’re dead to them now whatever happens.”

  Julan rubbed his forehead. Not for the first time, the thought occurred to Julan that the spider’s voice seemed very familiar to him, and that was bothersome. The feeling had been growing in him that he should know her, that she was someone important, someone who mattered to him, but that was impossible. “Do be quiet. I’m really getting tired of your nonsense, spider.”

  The spider’s eyes glittered. “Nonsense? If you wish to speak of nonsense, let’s speak of you. Questing like an infant, so sure of what you think you want as if you were no more than the mewling babe you were fifty years ago. A seven score and more year old child.”

  “I know what I must do!”

  “You don’t know anything. Why did you come here, really? To seek Death? Or, perhaps, a reason to live?”

  “I said be silent!”

  Julan, furious, snatched the blade from its sheath and started to swing it at the spider, only the spider wasn’t there. Julan couldn’t believe it had moved so quickly, yet there was the evidence of his own eyes. Julan stood, sword in hand, feeling foolish.

  “See that you stay absent, then, if you don’t want your shiny black shell cracked!” Julan said finally to the empty air as he sheathed the blade again. He descended the stairway alone, and in blessed silence.

  The torch really wasn’t as much use as Julan had expected, or at least not for light. The dungeon may have been carved down into living rock but there were windows cut through to the daylight outside. It was dim, and full of floating dust, but Julan could see well enough. The torch was more useful for burning away the cobwebs that blocked the stairs now and then. Julan kept a wary watch for the spider and her smaller cousins, but all the spiders he saw on the stairwell were dead, desiccated and crumbling.

  The silence, for its own part, was not so blessed now. It gave Julan time to think, and he did not want to think. His trip to the dungeon had been so different, before. The obstacles were gone, and Kalissa awaited. Now the obstacles were gone, and Death alone waited for him down in that dim, cold place.

  As Julan passed open doorways and alcoves he saw bundles of web. Some were shaped like boxes, and chests, and books. One or two were shaped like men. All were still, unmoving, lifeless. Julan wondered, for a moment, if he would know what he sought if he found it, but that was a foolish thought. Even as a young man he had known Death when he saw it. Would he be so much blinder now?

  The answer came soon enough. Julan came to a chamber much larger than the others, much larger and also emptier. His footfalls echoed there in the silence, and on the far wall there were attached two bundles of webbing. The one on the left was totally obscured, wrapped snug in the web. The one on the right looked like a man, and the head was not covered. Rather, it looked like a specific man.

  It looked like Julan.

  Julan looked into the cold black eyes of the young man imprisoned there and knew him for who and what he was. He heard nothing, but the words were clear in his mind.

  FREE ME.

  Julan raised his sword to cut the webbing, hesitated. “Perhaps I have been reckless. Perhaps the spider was right. Maybe I should not be so quick to do what cannot be undone.” Julan addressed his Death directly. “I know who you are.” He pointed at the other bundle with his sword. “Who is that?”

  DEATH, ALSO.

  “I have two? That seems a bit excessive.”

  NOT YOURS, FOOL.

  “I’m a fool? Well, I suspected as much. So. If not mine, whose?”

  “Mine, of course.”

  Too late, Julan felt the kiss at his neck. He just had strength to turn around, but the sword fell from his nerveless fingers. It made a ringing, clanging sound as it struck the stones.

  Enchantress Widow stood before him. She was exactly as he remembered: the long white hair, the pale face, luminous as the moon. She smiled at him.

  “Yes, as you see. I live.”

  “I thought I killed you!”

  “You tried but, like you, I cannot die. Yet.”

  Julan tried to reach for his sword, but he could not move. Widow simply shook her head.

  “You haven’t changed. Not in fifty years. I had hoped.”

  “What are you talking about? What evil have you planned for me?”

  “I planned much for you, Julan. Fortunately for you, I am a patient woman. Part of my nature.”

  “Evil is your nature!”

  “Is it? What have I done to you that you can say so?”

  “I should have known you still lived. You blighted this land with your evil, and so it remains!”

  “If you really believe that, then your knowledge of history is pathetic. The Abandoned Lands have always been the Abandoned Lands, and for good reason. I live here because no one else wants to, and because I value my privacy, that is all. You know that’s true.”

  Julan did know it. He didn’t want to, but he did. He searched for something else, found, much to his surprise, there was one other thing only to throw at her. “You kidnaped my beloved Kalissa! You would have drained the blood from her if I hadn’t rescued her!”

  Widow frowned. “Kalissa? That silly little blonde girl? Yes, I freely confess it: I did kidnap her. Drain her? I’m not a leech, Julan, whatever you may think. And who do you think sent you that nightly vision in the first place?”

  Julan just stared at her for several seconds. “You . . . ?”

  “What? You believed the fates or the purity of her spirit sent you a cry for help? Or did you t
hink of it at all? I doubt it.”

  Julan didn’t bother with more denials. There was no point. “Why did you do it?” Julan asked.

  “I had heard of you, Julan the Lucky. I was curious, so I sent for you, and you did come.”

  “I don’t believe you! I rescued Kalissa, and we were happy!”

  “Thanks to me, Julan the Lucky. You had a choice, though you were too thick to realize it. No matter; you chose well enough. I think Kalissa was right for you then. You were a pair: two callow children playing at love, two parts of one not very substantial whole. Would she be so now, even had she lived? Was it always the spider’s bite that made you dream of me?”

  “I don’t understand,” Julan said, though it wasn’t really true. He was beginning to understand.

  “Then you haven’t changed. At least, not enough. You seek Death, you who have yet to experience Life? Can you look at me now, and truly understand what you see? I doubt it.” Widow sighed. “Go away, Julan. Come back in fifty more years, perhaps. Face me when you grow up. Not before.”

  “I can’t leave. I can’t move!”

  The Widow made a clicking sound with her teeth. “You needn’t bother.”

  The last thing Julan remembered was the sound of thousands of spider feet scuttling across the stone floor. It sounded like rain.

  “Julan left his home and disappeared into the mists of time and legend. A proper fate for the hero-born; he will live in song forever.”

  —From the Epilogue of The Ballad of Julan the Lucky, Revised Standard ed.

  Julan awoke on the hard stone, the ashes of his campfires dead and cold beside him. He ached all over, and shivered from the chill. His neck felt numb and tingled a bit.

  “Must have slept wrong . . . ”